Recruitment Agency Tricks
Here are 14 of the worst recruitment agency tricks from Aussie contractor site www.Brainbox.com.au. There are plenty of competitors to get in the fourteen.
So, let‘s talk about blood sucking IT Contractor agents and the recruitment agenc tricks they perpetrate on contractors. They:-
1. Don’t Know What a Computer Is
Have N F I what a computer is, much less know what kind of candidate their client wants.
2. Can’t Return Calls
This is due to the complexity in using a telephone. Research suggests that it is the numbers between 0 and 9 that seems to confuse this strange species of tissue coagulate.
3. Can’t Return Emails
This is because of point 1. Normally needs to ask their Personal Assistant to get ‘that screen thing on the desk’ turned on.
4. Stare at Screensavers
Spends a great deal of time staring at the Screen Savers, because a sad lack of coordination skills does not allow them to click CNTRL-ALT-DEL at the same time.
5. Have No Qualifications to be a Recruitment Agent
To qualify to be an agent, the only experience you need is to be born and bred in England. The heavier the cockney accent, therefore, the higher your chances.
6. Object Oriented for Dummies
An agent will bring anyone who can spell Object Oriented in for an interview – little does the agent know that ‘Object Oriented’ is in fact an adjective, which requires a noun immediately after it, such as ‘Programming’ or ‘Design’ – and will insist on a candidate having ‘Object Oriented’ as their experience.
7. Send Clients Useless Candidates
An agent will send a Client the most useless candidates, more often than not, pulled off the street. That’s just in case the client is as stupid as the people being sent in for the interview.
8. Advertised Roles Miraculously Disappear
Will make up a fabulous sounding IT job and advertise them. After you call them and you are asked to submit your CV, the role mysteriously and immediately disappears, which seems to be due to the role having been either filled or suddenly removed from advertising by the client or very often, stolen by aliens from the planet Zartron.
9. Available for Work
Will call you out the blue asking if you are available for work.
a) If you are available for work, because you have not had an IT job in 6 months, an agent will say they expect a new role to be coming up in the next few weeks and will keep you in mind.
Actually Working in IT Role
b) If you are not available for work, because you are actually working in an IT role, an agent will then become very interested in what you are doing and especially the company you are working for, the name of your manager, the HR department, and if you are good friends with the CEO – and of course, is their any more work at your place of current employ so that the blood sucking agent can send in their ‘candidates’ – normally because they think ‘their’ candidates are better than another agents candidates – even though all the candidates provided by all agents are exactly the same person.
10. Advertising Similar Jobs
1Will advertise a Government job – the same job being advertised by 10 other agents, and then try to convince you that their agency is actually very chummy with the government department hiring officer and you should tell all other agents to bugger off as you have already been represented.
Note that this is also very good for the government, because on this basis they can claim that job vacancies in IT are going up – and there is a ‘skills’ shortage out there – hence we need to import IT skills from India.
11. Increase Agency Margins
Will need to work in their significant margins, so insisting you lower your measly rate. An agent thinks they are working very hard for the 15-20% mark up of your slave labour. No one actually knows what an agent actually does for their money – but it is certainly not work.
12. Sucker In Your Contractor Friends
Will try to get you to sucker in other contractors. These are your own hard to come by friends in the industry who actually know what they are doing. The agency will try to get you to send them in, and then try to submit your friends to other companies. Note the agency has still not performed any work. They will not tell you which hell-hole you will be recommending you friends to.
13. Will Claim Clients Are Their Clients
Will insist on Clients being ‘theirs’. In fact most agents are too stupid to realise that the client belongs to the Contractor – and the contractor only – because it is the work the contractor does that pays the bills – and gets the vampire agents their ‘margin’.
14. Some agents the Scum of the Earth
14. IT Agents are the scum of the earth – and the best thing about the downturn in IT was that most of these agents went down the toilet cistern – cast back to their place of origin.
There are plenty more recruitment agency tricks where this came from – so beware. Know what their dirty tricks are.
For a greater insight into agencies and how to deal with them successfully click on Agencies.
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